A Tribute to Samuel Gesser

(1930-2008)

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By D. A. Sonneborn

Samuel Gesser was best known across Canada as an impresario, a man who produced more than six thousand folk, classical, pop music, dance, and live theatre performances featuring many hundreds of artists—from Leonard Cohen to Janis Joplin; virtuosi Julian Bream, Van Cliburn, and Isaac Stern; the New York Philharmonic Orchestra; national folkloric dance ensembles from Africa, Asia, and Europe; classical and modern dance companies from Alvin Ailey to the Royal Winnipeg Ballet; musical theatre galore; and European and Chinese opera. In the 1960s he programmed jazz and classical music festivals as well as the Canadian pavilion stages at World Fairs in Montreal (Expo 67) and Osaka, Japan (Expo 70). After he retired from concert production in the 1990s, he wrote movie scripts and plays.

Sam would have been 80 years old on January 7, 2010. He and I became friends during the last several years of his life, and I miss him. All who knew him miss him. The last time I saw Sam, we were together in the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Quebec (just across the Ottawa River from the Canadian capital city in Ontario), where Sam had received the museum's Resonance Award for his outstanding lifetime contribution to Canada's musical heritage. Standing onstage on that first December night in 2007, he looked out at all of us in the audience filling the spacious hall for the Canadian Folk Music Awards and marveled, "When I started, I was the only one."

His legend originates much earlier, going back to when he was a boy growing up in working–class Montreal. Sam listened to folk music while babysitting for his uncle's children, and recalled the thrill of hearing the likes of Lead Belly, John Jacob Niles, and Josh White on 78 rpm records. During a vacation in Chicago from his job as a commercial artist (probably in 1950), visiting local jazz clubs and soaking up the scene, he spent some time browsing in a record store and found a Lead Belly 10-inch LP. Then, on his way back to Canada he read the list of other Folkways recordings in the album's booklet. He visited several record stores in Montreal, but not one of them carried Folkways records. In trademark Gesser fashion he took a bus south to Manhattan and went to Folkways Records and Service Corp.'s office to meet Folkways founder Moses Asch. "Why can't I find Folkways in Montreal?" I imagine Sam demanding of the older man. Asch told him Folkways needed a Canadian distributor—all Sam had to do was visit those record stores and take orders. Thus Gesser took his first step into the music business, and slowly grew a native Canadian network of record stores that carried Folkways titles. Ethnomusicologist Regula Qureshi interviewed Sam, who recalled:

During my first year with Folkways, I mentioned to Mr. Asch that their catalogue did not contain any Canadian records except for a Plains Indian LP. His response was "What are you going to do about it?" So I started recording folk singers, doing field recordings in the nearby Laurentians and contacting folksong collectors that devoted their lives to recording Canada's vocal history. I did have to promise to purchase a minimum of 100 albums of each of the tapes submitted for publication, making me a very motivated distributor.
(Qureshi 2007)

Between 1951 and 1964, Sam produced or helped along over a hundred Folkways albums of Canadian-based traditions: Aboriginal, First Nations, French, Anglo (British, Scots, Irish), Caribbean, Spanish, South American, German, Near Eastern, and Ukrainian music, poetry, language instruction, and more. Gesser's verbal contract with Asch was simple: he had to promise a wholesale purchase of one hundred copies of each title pressed. Sometimes he recorded the material himself, sometimes he simply gave the artist or producer of something he thought would fit the Folkways catalogue the address in New York. Moe never refused an album Sam offered him. Classic Canadian Songs from Smithsonian Folkways is a one-album overview of that extraordinary accumulation of music from the vast Canadian nation.

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